Master Plan May Not Have Prevented Monday Accident

(Aired on June 15, 2010)

An incident yesterday afternoon near Aberdeen Mall is already being used as a sounding board by groups wanting changes to bicycle routes in Kamloops. And I say "put aside the politics" until at least we know what happened.

A 57 year old Kamloops man was riding down Hillside Drive yesterday, when he collided with a transit bus making a left turn from Aberdeen Mall onto Hillside. Already those with political agendas are suggesting that such accidents require the City to make its bicycle plan a reality. One advocate says it's sad that we have to have a situation like this to draw attention to the lack of bike facilities in the city. I say that's trying to take advantage of a terrible accident to make a case for something that may or may not have resolved the problem.

I'm not going to talk about the Aberdeen accident yesterday in any detail, because no one knows what happened exactly. I will say that bike riders often come down that road way too quickly, as they do Columbia Street, Summit Drive and many other hills in the city. I will say that the interchange where the accident occurred is a bad one. It's one of several places in a block and a half where people have to make turns across two lanes of traffic, sometimes into glaring sunlight, and it's a wonder more accidents don't happen. I'm not suggesting for a moment that bicyclists shouldn't have a safe route to the downtown, something the master bike plan is designed to do. But there have to be other considerations too.

A safe bike route doesn't guarantee that people will always use it. Bike riders aren't always cautious. Their machines aren't equipped to stop on a dime, and if a motorist doesn't see them, they can't slow down quickly enough to avoid a collision. They often don't obey the rules of the road.

Let's push for the master bike plan, but let's not use a sad situation that resulted from an accident that may have been hard to prevent as some kind of leverage, when in fact the bike plan may not have had any impact on the situation anyway. I hate it when people do that.